Comment on Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s doing what the Geo Guesser-like people do.

  Like ‘this kind of rock formation only appears in Eastern Europe, the wheel you see in the lower left of the screen has Cyrillic writing and if you look in eastern Europe there is one mountain formation that looks like the picture when viewed from a specific angle and so they had to be within this 50m circle’.

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  • Meron35@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Eh, kind of both.

    When researchers peeked into which areas of the image were being used, it showed that the tiny camera watermark from the Google Streetview car was being used by the model a lot.

    That is, the recognition system had learned all the routes every Google Street view car had taken, and was using that in its recognition process.

    Not all images have this watermark though, so in the cases the watermark didn’t exist it then resorts to more traditional geoguessr tactics.

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  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is the kind of thing that machine learning is very very good at. Its never going to be perfect but its definitely gonna outperform humans.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      In addition, any organization that’s using this at scale will also have human experts to handle the edge cases and to validate the system’s findings.

      We can’t copy the human expert without years of training, but copying a program/computer system is only a few terminal commands. The ability to do this kind of thing at scale is entirely new.

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  • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Download some pictures and ask ChatGPT thinking to find the locations.

    It’s already trained on geoguesser data, even if that wasn’t a core feature.

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  • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s not hard. I once saw a random “what is this thing” photo from a bad angle. But it included a store in the background. Only two stores in North America with that name, though Google map search tried to be helpful and return a bunch of other results. Easy enough to check both.

    Even with the extra street view angles I couldn’t figure out what the thing was though :(

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s one of those tasks where it has a bunch of little components, each of which is easy to do (like identifying a store, or mineral formation, or road signs, etc) and so it is a thing that you can design machine learning tools around the individual tasks (‘what is this rock?’) and then instead of needing a highly trained human being to take a few minutes/hours to go through all of the details from memory, you can just push thousands of pictures through an AI system and get ‘good enough’ results.

      It seems like there is a company selling such a ‘good enough’ service.

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